MAY 2026 SULLYGRAM:  And so the April rains of May arrive, as late as Alice’s White Rabbit, dripping laser light from an impatient sun breaking through in shafts. Up come green shoots and out burst pink buds in response like eager ears unfolding to the pied-piper tympany of raindrops. Spring, renewal. Never gets old. Makes me lean back and ponder the perennial drives of life, which I see as Sex, Fame and Fortune – the Big 3 desires we pursue by choice. But two of them are lies and the other only means something lasting if it’s connected to Love. I think I bailed on Fame when I was a kid. But I’ve never bailed on Love-Sex. And Fortune? I feel fortunate not to have one. Details…  

Guess it’s safe to say, we see fame as love or admiration. The want of it may be as grand as a Walter Mitty fantasy or as fundamental as self-love. Related words come to mind – competition, achievement, perfection – the positives of a fame quest. And the negatives? Surely, fear of failure leads the way, as well as falling short of expectations. Take away the expectations and…well, I’ve seen an athlete who was predictable to the tenth of a second suddenly drop four seconds and barely miss a national record just by being told to deliberately lose! And what if the fame quest runs out the clock? Do we surrender to advancing years, pursuing goals vicariously through grand-children and surrogate sport teams? Does identity have a minimum? How much ego can you farm out to a proxy and not become a zombie? Makes me think of Zen’s self-effacement, which I regard as an escape based on fear similar to the induced calm of a nervous breakdown. And I’ve known nurturing types of people who indulge giving to others so obsessively that you wonder if theirs is the root drive of mindless social insects. Probably some proportion of these fears and desires exist in all of us; and therein we are defined.  

I think I’m low on the borrowing scale of fame. To compete is to be vital, alive, growing, while I seldom relate to teams or reflected glory (the photo below of me playing deep-end goalie is from one of the few eras in my life where I bonded whole-heartedly with a team). Moreover, competing can be a completely private endeavor for me, as long as I have a metric to measure performance. I used to ask athletes, “Would you train by yourself for a year if you knew that at the end you’d break a world record but no one would ever know about it except you?” With due thought, the honest answer was always “no.” My answer was always “yes.” Strikes me as similar motivation to movie stars foregoing careers for creative control behind the scenes, or musicians souring on tours or switching from pop to classical or Broadway. People often mistook me for their tribe in the 60s, and I was certainly seen as a non-conformist if not a hippie. But truth be told, I was never drawn to what looked to me like “let’s all be different together.” Laughably, as a jock, I was once listed by a fraternity that I had never pledged, never joined. Enjoyed respect growing up but had no peer pressure on me at all.

“Lucky in cards [fortune], unlucky in love,” they say. I’ll get to fortune in a paragraph or two, but in matters of the heart (and loins), I never understood the game. Are the three-letter word (sex) and the four-letter word (love) interchangeable? If they ever were, it must have been by a very small contingent separated by time and space and the warm pages of a few novels. I think I was one of those few, if only for selfish reasons. Guess I was a romantic idealist on the trip through puberty – still call myself a romantic idealist. Seemed to me that exclusivity enhances love and super-charges sex. Compromise one and you diminish the other, rather like the irony in “The Gift of the Magi.” The mutual enhancement of exclusivity was a symbiosis I thought everyone felt, but the world convinced me that sex and love were not inseparable. It was never a moral issue. More of a quid pro quo. Still, through all the complexities of life, this remains true: what you give is what you get.

The histories of mating, raising families, and socially codified marriage are rich in glimpses of our evolving natures. Think of bonding in the Age of Grunts as Uglak and Penelope – cave, club, here comes the bride. Plenty of evidence that the selection process remained brutal for a long time. Include pillage, slavery, Biblical exhortations to seize 200 brides from Shiloh as described in the Book of Judges, Viking raids, American Indian inter-tribal kidnappings, astrological unions, and even today things like involuntary Bride Capture in Tajikistan. And, of course, much of the world still follows arranged marriages and doweries. Peachy romantic. Scant evidence that oversight was ever more than contractual, unless you subscribe to standing naked in a garden while eating apples and talking to snakes; or turtles all the way down. The bargain of evolution bluntly put was that nurturing women attract a provider-protector for themselves and their children, and men get sex and heirs in return. But the bargain of evolution began modifying when standing armies and the rule of law ushered in civilization, nudging aside individual roles, even if the imprinted needs of both man and woman still linger emotionally. The devil is in the details, as they say, across a wide array of global practices whether it’s coy and consensual couples playing hide the sausage or the formal conventions of parental negotiations.

And the future of love-sex? If people can cozy up to pet rocks and create virtual love affairs with on-line avatar games like “Second Life,” AI will almost certainly deliver everyone their fantasy from “true love for life” to what’s called “Complex Marriage” and polyamory triads. And what of family? A sticky wicket TBD. Divorce? Easy Peezy for assets and much safer than, say, India’s horror of the 1980s where “bride burning” was epidemic. Glad I caught the brass ring on the carousel before love went all to hell.

So, if you’re keeping score in this take on the Big 3 wish list, it’s dead even. Love-Sex thumbs up, Fame thumbs down. That leaves what I call the second lie behind Fame: to wit, Fortune. Scrooge McDuck might enjoy bathing in gold doubloons and greenbacks, but would you really want the hassle of being rich? I mean filthy rich, Mt. Moolah rich, lottery ticket rich? Too many assets mean you have to trust too many people to guard, manage and invest your stash. Lots of lawyers/CPAs/managers, lots of people sucking on the corporate tit. I’ve looked over the shoulders of a few who are owned by such wealth – and known very well someone with assets north of $100 million – and it’s definitely not for me. Give me modest needs, reasonable security, and some hope of easing the financial uncertainties faced by my heirs and assigns. Of course, the illusion of security magnifies the things you can’t control – inflation, national bankruptcy, natural catastrophe, the increasing possibility that the socialism lean of our country will reach the point where anything resembling wealth will simply be seized as proposed in California’s wealth tax, etc. But you can’t take it with you, and you can’t lose what you don’t have. Methinks Kris Kristofferson penned it best for Janis Joplin to sing a few weeks before her death: “…freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan